U.S.-Saudi security cooperation is becoming steadily more important as Iran expands its capabilities for asymmetric warfare in the Gulf, increases its long-range missile forces, and moves toward a capability to build and deploy nuclear weapons. The same is true of the...

Kim Jong-il’s stroke back in August 2008 and his continued frail health have brought the succession question to the center of the North Korean political/military agenda and to the forefront of global discussion and speculation regarding the insular communist state....

The recent five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina brought about a flurry of public retrospectives on what has and has not changed since one of America’s most tragic natural disasters. The most prominent of these was President Obama’s speech at Xavier...

The U.S. cannot ignore Afghan corruption and hope for any kind of victory or meaningful end state in the Afghan conflict. The fact remains, however, that corruption is only one of the problems that the U.S. and its allies must address in an active war zone, and...

On April 20th, British Petroleum (BP)’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, causing a sea-floor oil leak one mile beneath the ocean’s surface. On June 15th, U.S. government officials estimated...

The North Caucasus experienced another deadly summer (May 1 – August 31, 2010). Although Chechnya and Ingushetia saw comparatively less violence than they did in Summer 2009, we observed a troubling rise in the level of violence in Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria....

There are three areas where there still seems to be confusion about the formal end of US combat operations in Iraq. Many of these issues have already been address in two sets of analyses by the Burke Chair: